Intermittent simulated moving bed chromatography: 1. Design criteria and cyclic steady-state.

The intermittent SMB (I-SMB) process is a multi-column chromatographic process, which is a modification of the conventional SMB process, has been applied so far only in the sugar industry and is claimed to achieve higher productivity. In the I-SMB process the time interval between two port switches is divided in two sub-intervals, and only during the first the product streams are collected. The potential of the I-SMB technology is demonstrated in the case of the separation of a binary mixture subject to the linear isotherm by using both the equilibrium theory of chromatography and detailed simulations. It is shown that a I-SMB with only four columns can achieve much higher separation performance than a SMB unit with four columns.